BlackBerry CEO Derides Apple — Australian Financial Review

In an exclusive interview with The Australian Financial Review, BlackBerry (NASDAQ: BBRY) CEO Thorsten Heins took a swipe at Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) and the venerable iOS operating system. Heins predicted that BlackBerry's new operating system, BlackBerry 10 (BB10), and the touchscreen Z10 smartphone would have 100,000 apps available by the time of the phone's U.S. launch later this week.

Heins also had this to say about the iPhone:

The user interface on the iPhone, with all due respect for what this invention was all about is now five years old.

The inference we are supposed to draw is that newer is not only different, but better. That may well be true, but the usual corollary of that inference is that in order for something new to disrupt the existing marketplace it must be 10 times better and cost half as much. Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) tipped the cost scale to free with its Android operating system, and Android is now the global leader in software platforms for smartphones.

BlackBerry, and Heins, then cannot compete with Google on cost or with Apple or Google on apps, so what's left? Heins points to BB10's multitasking capability, something neither Apple nor Google yet supports.

But the paradigm Heins appears to be applying is that a smartphone operating system should be more like a laptop's or a PC's. That is not where the industry is headed. The ubiquity of smartphones and tablets is changing the way users interact with devices, and the apps-driven interfaces already have begun to surface, as in Windows 8 from Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Google Chrome.